Contents of the EASY.DOC file

Here are some tips to help beginners cope with POV-Ray's flood of methods to set command-line parameters.

The easiest way to run POV-Ray is with a batchfile. Here's thegeneral idea. Create a text file called RUNPOV.BAT or something similar.A sample file is included in this archive and its contents are shown below. Be sure to edit the drive and paths to match your system. If you place this batch file in a directory which is on your DOS path, then you may run POV-Ray from any directory without adding the C:\POVRAY2 directory to your path.

In your POVRAY2 directory you should have POVRAY.EXE and a number of .DEFfiles. You should create different .DEF files for different purposes.For example QUICK.DEF could be a 160x100 test render with low quality settings. FINAL.DEF might be 640x680 with full quality and anti-aliasing.

Several sample .DEF files are included in this archive and their contentsare given below.

To use RUNPOV.BAT you type the name of the .DEF file followed by the nameof the scene file like this:

RUNPOV FINAL MYSCENE

This will run POV-Ray using FINAL.DEF rendering MYSCENE.POV to MYSCENE.TGA.Note that you don't have to type the extension .DEF or .POV because thebatch file adds it for you.

If FINAL.DEF didn't include anti-aliasing you could add it like this:

RUNPOV FINAL MYSCENE +A0.1 +R4 +J0.5

The first parameter must always be a .DEF file in the c:\povray2 directoryand the second parameter must be a .POV scene file. After that you may addup to 7 more command-line switches to modify or add to the basic settings in your chosen .DEF file.

Here is the contents of the sample .DEF files we've provided. Editthese or create your own. Note the dashed lines and filenames are not part of the file.